old value of Brother's Keeper

old value of Brother's Keeper

Hello,My mother uses "Brother's Keeper" software for her geneology. She is very experienced at geneology but still has many many struggles with computers/software. When backing up her work she believes the "notes" she makes are not included in the back-up and therefore lost. The price of software is very cheap and so I am wondering if Brother's Keeper" is 1 a well credentialed program 2 Is there better programs3 Can all her work be transferred easily to any new software4 Is there programs more suited to people like mum who are "Australian" .

Re: old value of Brother's Keeper

1 - yes, it's a long standing program in the field, with regular updates.

2 - Define better. If you have some specific requirements, you'd have to state them.

3 - Yes and no. Any reasonably modern genealogy program can export and import GEDCOMs, so in that sense, yes. Can she shift from BK to say Family Tree Maker with absolutely no loss of data, probably not. Note, that the same is true for almost all programs. Very few programs can fully read the data sets from another program. So, if she wanted to shift from Family Tree Maker to Roots Magic, she'd likely lose data.

4 - What is special, from a computer programming issue, about Australia?

As for notes, you have to select to back up notes, images, media files, etc when you do the backup routine.

Re: old value of Brother's Keeper

Thank-you very much for taking the time to help me, I really appreciate it.

To define what Mum uses BK for. Originally she traced the usual decendents on the paternal side and some on the maternal in Australia. As you would well know this quickly led overseas (away from young Australia) into our anglo english past. She has done quite a lot in this area as well. Now she is looking to do more but also wants to create an "accessible" mini-magazine type of thing with pictures etc for our family.(Thats where I come in at some point to supposedly help). So I guess what I am asking is will the current version of BK do all that well?Thanks again for your helpDave

Re: old value of Brother's Keeper

Hmm. I'm not seeing anything special or different about the needs for somebody in Australia vs any place else in regards to genealogy programming.

BK can create the standard reports (desendent, ancestor, register, etc) like other programs.

It can auto generate family group sheets in html, including the notes (stories, etc) created for the various events / facts. That report can include one photo per group sheet.

I'm not sure if Any program can really easily auto generate a mini magazine.

What I have done is create a web site, partially from BKs auto generated html family group sheets and partially by hand. I copy the entire site to CD along with an auto executable and mail it.

The auto generated part contains up to date facts, notes and stories about everybody in the database. The hand generated part contains the photos of people.

The problem I've seen with sharing info is what happens when you add a fact to a dozen or so people. With the auto generated html, that fact is published faily easily, albeit not in a very pretty method.

Trying to put out a magazine would mean re-formatting, re-editing or such to add in what is often a few lines of often not critical facts such as they lived in Perth during WWII before moving to a suburb of Perth after the war.

In summary, will BK do what you want? Sort of. Will any program do it better? I don't think so.

BK does have a significant advantage over other programs. The programmer runs a mailing list via rootsweb. He has been very willing to add new types of reports to extract data from the database.